Before I ever picked up this book, I had written a pretty solid outline for the paper I was writing on James Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission. After having read several different lists of “defining characteristics of the China Inland Mission,” I formed my own list of five, and I was happy with it. Then, after the library called and told me that Bacon’s Faith had come in, I opened the book and found that Bacon’s list in “Part I” and the topics he discussed were nearly identical to my own. It was a pat on my own back for sure, and it made me look to Bacon as a great source of Taylor-information as well.

This “book,” in fact, is actually a dissertation Bacon completed for his Doctor of Missiology from the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and I am thankful to the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF and formerly the China Inland Mission) for publishing the “OMF Books Study Series” and making this paper a part of it. If you are looking for more information on missiology, consider looking into this series of publications. To search for locations near you that may carry specific titles, you can access that information at worldcat.org.